I recently started using github.com/immich-app/immich

It’s basically a self hosted Google Photos and it’s working really well. You can just mount your heap of photos into the container, declare it as external library and you’re good to go.

After a few hours/days of training the face recognition, extracting meta data, generating thumbnails ans possibly transcoding videos you’ll have a very responsive and easily searchable timeline of ALL your pictures and videos.